Everybody’s linking to Ryan Tomayko’s post, I like Unicorn because it’s Unix, but I’m not going to let it keep me from linking to it as well. It’s a paean to the Unix design philosophy, and really illustrates how few applications these days are built on that philosophy. Go read it. It’s good.
Turns out that not only do airline customers hate baggage fees, but they seem to be avoiding airlines that charge them.
Nicholas Tabarrok points out that the movie business is unique in that the cost of producing movies does not affect the price customers pay to see a movie: One interesting thing that I’ve always found about the film business from an economic point of view is that unlike in any other business I can think of, the cost of manufacturing the product has no affect on the purchase cost to the consumer. For example Honda can make a cheaper car with less features and cheaper finishes than BMW without losing all of their customers to the superior car because they sell their product for less. You spend less to make something, you charge less for it. Makes complete and obvious sense. Not so in the film business. I am an independent film producer and I make films that typically cost somewhere between $5M and $10M. But when I make, say, an $8M film it has to compete at the same price level as the studios’ $80M or $100M film. It costs the consumer the same $12 at the multiplex (and whatever it costs to rent a DVD from Blockbuster these days) for either film. There is no price advantage to the consumer for choosing to see a less expensive film. This naturally makes it terribly difficult for smaller films to find an audience. I find this quite fascinating and I can’t readily think of another industry like it. ...
Matthew Yglesias makes a pretty convincing argument that the most effective path to slowing down climate change is putting a price on carbon. Right now, carbon emissions are untaxed, so there’s no market mechanism to reward a reduction in carbon emissions other than the price of using energy. Unfortunately, energy prices are largely decoupled from their environmental impact.
Cooks Illustrated editor Christopher Kimball laments the demise of Gourmet in a New York Times op-ed today. Unfortunately, in the process of reminding us what was good about Gourmet, he decides to case aspersions of the darned old Internet along the way: The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades. ...
One of my favorite old saws is the saying, “Half of life is just showing up.” I like it because it’s true – one of the keys to getting the most out of life is having a large number and variety of experience. Chris Dixon adds a key corollary to that point – don’t forget to ask questions.
I was shocked to read today that Gourmet magazine is ceasing publication, and that the November issue will be the last. We started getting the magazine this year (as a gift) and I have been really impressed with it. It’s interesting from cover to cover, and the photography is beautiful. We’ve made a number of really good recipes we got from Gourmet as well. One of my favorite little things about the magazine is that the subscriber edition doesn’t include any marketing copy on the cover. It’s just the name of the magazine, and the cover photo. I don’t know why more magazines don’t take that approach. ...
National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry probably has as much experience in Afghanistan as anyone in the West. He describes the problems we face, but doesn’t propose any solutions, probably because there aren’t any. Click on the link for the photos alone. I particularly liked this sentence: Maybe one definition of hell is that is the place where more effort produces fewer results.
Top Chef Masters winner Rick Bayless explains what he likes about Twitter: On Twitter, I can do three things: I share photos of what’s going on in the restaurant (behind the scenes as well as finished dishes I’m really excited about); I share photos of cool food (and food-related things) I find outside my restaurant (markets, restaurants, events either in Chicago or away from home), and I answer some of the questions that are posted to my Twitter account. ...
The kind of conservatism I respect is the conservatism that says we should be careful about changing our institutions, because there’s risk in changing things. You sometimes wind up with something worse. This is why the conservative party in the UK is a strong defender of the socialized National Health Service. The conservative impulse is to preserve existing institutions. So I liked this conservative question from Dan Drezner about Jon Stewart’s legendary Crossfire appearance: ...